Uhhh - not again

I'm a member of a site called Urbis.

Urbis is a writer's forum, but not in the sense of normal internet forums (though it does have one of those) but more along the lines of a writer's group like you might get as part of a teaching course. The jist is that you post up pieces of your work, and then other writers offer critique.

Now, there are quite a few of these types of site on the intarwebs, but what sets Urbis apart is their use of a credit system. This works like money - for every review you write you get credits, which you then have to spend to unlock the reviews people do of your own work.

It's quite simple, but very clever (as are all the best ideas) because what it means is that everybody is forced to contribute in order to get what they want - critique of their own work. Normally on writer's sites, everybody posts their stuff, but nobody bothers reading or reviewing it. And if they do review it, then they simply give you slap on the back and tell you you're great - even if you're not.

At Urbis, because you have to pay for reviews and the system is finely balanced so that, very roughly speaking, one review you write unlocks one review of your own work, if someone gives you a rubbish review, you can ask for a refund and then spend the points getting at reviews that actually help you improve your work. Also, things are done anonymously, so you can't really be prejudiced when writing reviews.

However, and this isn't really a complaint about the system, I do seem to find myself making exactly the same points over and over again.

There's a book called "Techniques of the Selling Writer" by Dwight Swain, and what this book does is to lay out all the fundamentals of modern fiction writing. One of the points made in the book is actually that there's no such thing as a set of hard-and-fast rules, but as far as these things go, that's what he gives you - a set of basic rules, the mastery of which will set you in good stead.

Some of the absolute basic ones are:

• Show, don't tell;
• Nothing happens at the same time - only sequentially; and of course
• Review your work several times before you show it to anyone (for both spelling/grammar and sense).

And I seem to have to keep making those same points about things I read on Urbis over and over again.

But the worst part is that I was the same when I started - someone on Urbis told me about the book. So in many ways I feel honour bound to pass this information on and tell them about the book, but it doesn't half get depressing when within the first 5 sentences of a 5,000 word piece someone has done all three of the above :(.